Warm DBI Inflation

We propose a warm inflationary model in the context of relativistic D-brane inflation in a warped throat, which has Dirac-Born-Infeld (DBI) kinetic term and is coupled to radiation through a dissipation term. The perturbation freezes at the sound horizon and the power spectrum is determined by a combination of the dissipative parameter and the sound speed parameter. The thermal dissipation ameliorates the {\it eta} problem and softens theoretical constraints from the extra-dimensional volume and from observational bounds on the tensor-to-scalar ratio. The warm DBI model can lead to appreciable non-Gaussianity of the equilateral type. As a phenomenological model, ignoring compactification constraints, we show that large-field warm inflation models do not necessarily yield a large tensor-to-scalar ratio.Comment: 5 pages, 1 figure, IPMU-10-019

Impacts of the U.S.-Central America-Dominican Republic Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA-DR) on U.S. Fruit Exports - the Apple Case

The U.S.-Central America-Dominican Republic Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA-DR) levels the playing field of trade between the United States and the six CAFTA-DR partner countries. Half of U.S. farm products gain immediate tariff-free access to the markets of the CAFTA-DR region. All Tariffs will be eliminated in 20 years. Under CAFTA-DR, tariffs on an important U.S. fresh fruit export to the region, fresh apples, declined from an initial base of 15%-25% in CAFTA-DR countries to zero immediately upon enforcement. The specific objective of this research is to analyze the impact of tariff elimination under CAFTA-DR on the trade of U.S. fresh apples. Generalized Method of Moments (GMM) is used for the analysis involving an excess-supply-excess-demand model with monthly trade data from January 2000 to December 2010. The more telling empirical results indicate that for each of the six CAFTA-DR countries, tariff elimination positively promotes U.S. apple exports to this region.CAFTA-DR, trade liberalization, tariff elimination, Generalized Method of Moments(GMM), Agricultural and Food Policy, International Relations/Trade, Q17, F13, F15,

ACREAGE PLANTING DECISION ANALYSIS OF SOUTH CAROLINA TOMATOES: NERLOVIAN VERSUS JUST RISK MODEL

Factors which explain supply response behavior of South Carolina tomato growers were determined. Two well known supply response models were used for comparison: the Nerlovian structural model and the Just risk model. The Just risk model reflected the significance of the risk effect in both stable and unstable periods. An evaluation of forecasting power between the two models was indeterminate. Growers are apparently willing to invest in more information with increased market instability because growers were influenced by the Florida winter price of tomatoes in planting decisions during the period of instability.Crop Production/Industries,

PC-SEAPAK user's guide, version 4.0

PC-SEAPAK is designed to provide a complete and affordable capability for processing and analysis of NOAA Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometer (AVHRR) and Nimbus-7 Coastal Zone Color Scanner (CZCS) data. Since the release of version 3.0 over a year ago, significant revisions were made to the AVHRR and CZCS programs and to the statistical data analysis module, and a number of new programs were added. This new version has 114 procedures listed in its menus. The package continues to emphasize user-friendliness and interactive data analysis. Additionally, because the scientific goals of the ocean color research being conducted have shifted to larger space and time scales, batch processing capabilities were enhanced, allowing large quantities of data to be easily ingested and analyzed. The development of PC-SEAPAK was paralled by two other activities that were influential and assistive: the global CZCS processing effort at GSFC and the continued development of VAX-SEAPAK. SEAPAK incorporates the instrument calibration and support all levels of data available from the CZCS archive